Pyongyang has reacted angrily to the Yoon-Biden summit, saying it consolidated its conviction to perfect its “nuclear war deterrent”…reports Asian Lite News
North Korea criticised a recent US-South Korea agreement to bolster the deployment of American strategic assets in the region for escalating tension to the “brink of a nuclear war,” state media KCNA said on Monday.
President Joe Biden and South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol held a summit last week, during which Biden pledged to give Seoul more insight into its nuclear planning over any conflict with North Korea as anxiety grows over Pyongyang’s weapons programmes and the American nuclear umbrella.
Both leaders agreed to strengthen South Korea’s defences and regularly deploy US strategic assets. As part of the efforts, a US Navy nuclear-armed ballistic missile submarine will visit South Korea for the first time since the 1980s.
KCNA said the agreement stipulated the allies’ willingness to take “the most hostile and aggressive action” against North Korea, citing Choe Ju Hyon, whom it described as an international security analyst.
The stationing of American strategic assets has placed the situation of the Korean peninsula in a “quagmire of instability,” and was intended to build “aggressive and exclusive military blocs” in the region, it said.
“It is just aimed to dodge the responsibility for the worst-ever nuclear-related crimes it has committed by systematically destroying and violating the nuclear non-proliferation system, and in particular, pushing the situation of the Korean Peninsula to the brink of a nuclear war,” KCNA said.
“It is the hegemonic sinister aim pursued by the US to turn the whole of South Korea into its biggest nuclear war outpost in the Far East and effectively use it for attaining its strategy for dominating the world.”
Pyongyang has reacted angrily to the Yoon-Biden summit, saying it consolidated its conviction to perfect its “nuclear war deterrent.”
Envoys discuss threat
The top nuclear envoys of South Korea and the US have met in Seoul to discuss ways to cooperate on countering North Korea’s “evolving nuclear and military threats”, the foreign ministry said.
US Special Representative for North Korea Sung Kim held a meeting with his South Korean counterpart, Kim Gunn, on Tuesday on the sidelines of the Asan Plenum 2023 conference, a security forum hosted by a local think tank, Yonhap news agency reported.
“The two sides shared their assessments of the current security situation on the Korean Peninsula and discussed joint responses to North Korea’s nuclear threats,” the ministry said in a statement.
The envoys agreed to strengthen close coordination on Pyongyang to make it cease provocations and return to denuclearisation talks, based on the agreements from the South Korea-US summit held in Washington last week.
It is their third consultation this month, following a bilateral session in Seoul on April 6 and phone talks on April 13.
Kim Jong Un’s sister issues warning
North Korea’s Kim Yo Jong, the powerful sister of leader Kim Jong Un, has warned that her country will stage more displays of military might in response to a new agreement between South Korea and the United States to intensify nuclear deterrence to counter threats from Pyongyang.
The agreement reached this week between Washington and Seoul to shore up South Korean nuclear security will only worsen the situation and demonstrates “extreme” hostility towards North Korea, Kim Yo Jong said.
North Korea is now convinced it must further perfect a “nuclear war deterrent“, Kim Yo Jong said, according to comments published by the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA).
“The more the enemies are dead set on staging nuclear war exercises and the more nuclear assets they deploy in the vicinity of the Korean peninsula, the stronger the exercise of our right to self-defence will become in direct proportion to them,” she said, according to KCNA.
The US-South Korea agreement will “only result in making peace and security of Northeast Asia and the world be exposed to more serious danger, and it is an act that can thus never be welcome”, she said.
Kim Yo Jong also blasted President Joe Biden over his warning that North Korean nuclear aggression would result in the end of the Kim regime, describing the US leader as being “too miscalculating and irresponsibly brave”.
North Korea would not simply dismiss Biden’s words as a “nonsensical remark from the person in his dotage”, she added.
“When we consider that this expression was personally used by the president of the US, our most hostile adversary, it is threatening rhetoric for which he should be prepared for far too great an after-storm.”
Kim Yo Jong did not specify exactly what actions North Korea is planning to take.
South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol and Biden this week issued what was titled the Washington Declaration, bolstering the US nuclear umbrella over South Korea, which is increasingly nervous about Pyongyang’s aggression. The declaration involves “regular deployment of strategic assets”, including the first South Korean port visit by a US nuclear ballistic submarine in decades, a Washington official said. There are no plans to station US nuclear weapons in South Korea.
